Well, my sister wants wireless out at her place, and I replaced my old WRT54GS with a Belkin N+ router and was not impressed at all. It offers no 3rd party firmware, its static allocation allows like 8 entries, etc. So I picked up a new Asus RT-N16 for myself and am selling my sister my old hardware (it's brand new practically).

The Asus RT-N16 has full gigabit nic's (even on the uplink), it's wireless n, has 2 usb ports (printers, hard drives, etc), fully supports 3rd party firmware, has a 533mhz processor (though downclocked), 128mb ram, 32mb flash... It's like a computer in a router lol...

I've had it like a week now, it's like the difference in night and day as compared to my old WRT54GS... So much in fact, I decided that I needed to buy a new switch to replace the one that burned out so I didn't need to have 3 routers hooked up that where all setup to be switches lol...

So I ended up buying the D-Link DGS-2208 (8 port, full gigabit, "green"/low power) switch... Now all of my time spent replacing cat5 with cat5e/cat6 over the last couple of years is worth it... I have gigabit nic's in a couple of my systems, but it even seems faster on other devices too...

THEN, on Saturday Morning I noticed that one of my external hard drives wouldn't power, I tried and tried and FINALLY got it to load, and was greeted with nothing but errors... Yeah, it is toast... So I went through and figured out my finances (while being locked out of my bank's website) and scraped enough together to order the Western Digital Elements 2TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive which should be here on Wednesday... With any luck I won't have any of the hw issues with it that other people have had with prior hw versions...

Best of all, coupons coupons coupons... I found loads of them on google (cas I'm cheap)... Got $10 off on the hd and $18 off on the router... And because it's "back to school" season, everyone has summer sales which saved me quite the bit of cash lol...

But go figure that once i spend all of my cash on things I wanted, something breaks and i need to pull together cash for something I needed (the hard drive)... But I'll have a 2tb drive which is like 4x the storage of my old drive...

I wonder now:
- How many mods will think this is spam due to all of the links
- If anyone will actually read through it lol.

Nope I read through all of it Understood most of it.... and am looking up the router and the switch while responding LOL...

Dunny

i read through it all. but I have been following your exploits on facebook as well.

Giz aint on my Facebook, hummmmm.

Anyway. I have not had much of a problem going gigabit on Cat5e and for any long type distance we use fiber lines anyway. Now the microwave link is the bottle neck in the entire system as it is only 54 Meg/Sec connection.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time researching what I wanted to end up with; once funding permitted (a little) I went for it (since either way I had $80 to pick up a router)... Just wasn't expecting the hard drive problems lol...

I read it here and on FB

I have been using dlink for a while. Even though I have a issue with the dir 655.
Meaning with momentary power outages it shows a error with port forwarding. It has worked quite well.
So my next step is to install the D-Link DGS-2208. Just been to lazy to do it.

Read through it. Understood it all. I'm running an Airport Extreme base station which has N, 4 wired ports, and one USB. For storeage I have a G-Technology 500GB G-DRIVE mini Portable Hard Drive. None of it is cutting edge, it's all a few years old now, but all of it does exactly what I need it to do.

<3 lol

Ruben, if you go with the DGS2208 you'll love it... Though the 5 port version (Open Box) is like $14 right now (it was like $8)

Well, I needed a new switch since my old Linksys one burnt out (I was using 2 routers in its place) and figured one green device would use like a fourth of the power of the 2 routers lol...

The WRT54GS worked, and it worked well, but I wanted to go wireless n, and i wanted something with a little more power, and I wanted the 3rd party firmware (that the belkin didn't offer) and I wanted to have unlimited static allocations that the stock belkin firmware just didn't allow..